Howard Zinn
In
this year 2000, I cannot comment more meaningfully on the Fourth of July than
Frederick Douglass did when he was invited in 1852 to give an Independence Day
address. He could not help thinking about the irony of the promise of the
Declaration of Independence, of equality, life, liberty made by slaveowners, and
how slavery was made legitimate in the writing of the Constitution after a
victory for "freedom" over England. And his invitation to speak came
just two years after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, committing the
national government to return fugitives to slavery with all the force of the
law.
So
it is fitting, at a time when police are exonerated in the killing of unarmed
black men, when the electric chair and the gas chamber are used most often
against people of color, that we refrain from celebration and instead listen to
Douglass’ sobering words:
"Fellow
citizens: Pardon me, and allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here
today? What have I or those I represent to do with your national independence?
Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied
in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called
upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the
benefits, and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your
independence to us?
"What
to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to
him more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to
which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration s a sham; your boasted
liberty an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds
of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants,
brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery;
your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious
parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and
hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of
savages. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking
and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.
"Go
and search wherever you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of
the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse and when you
have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of
this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and
shameless hypocrisy, American reigns without a rival…."